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Posts Tagged ‘jam’

Hello I’m Ovidiu aka: Hamsterspit and I am a 3D modeler artist that also is learning how to rig and animate and I would like to get to know people who are interested in making small surreal games or games that I can relate to and where my skills can be handy.

Check out my style at: hamsterspit to see if you can relate to what I do and will go from there!

Im gonna talk about a problem with our site here. (I’m not a mod, just using our as a community thingy) A-lot of people have been really bummed lately, due to seeing plenty of triple digits in there scores. Now, I can see this as concerning, and especially unfair. But check this out, you made a Video Game! And actually had the balls to submit it to the public! I’d be pretty proud If I were you. Yeah, so what if you got < 100 on all your ranks. YOU still had fun making it didn’t you? You learned from making it didn’t you? If you said yes to either of those, congrats! You’re a winner! You don’t need to tell people you got >10/200.

What I’m trying to say here, its fantastic job to all of you. You went through the effort, and if you hit the submit button, it was worth it. You now get feedback, and can say confidently that you didn’t wuss out like many other developers who somehow don’t think that they could even compete in this!

I’m proud of all of you! I hope you stick around for next jam! New site, new judging system, it should all be well and good! Have a fantastic morning/afternoon/evening where ever you are!

I gotta say this Ludum has been one of the best so far for me. (Even though it’s only my second one) Alot of people played my game compared to my last game (Seriously like 6 times as many people). I’ve learned alot from this jam. And I appreciate the mountain of feedback you guys have given me. I’ve had 3 YouTubers play my game and even some streamers.

Two things really stood out.

1: How motivated you can get when there’s 3 hours left in the jam (Seriously I got more content in those 3 hours than I did the first day).

2: The community.

What do I mean by community? Well, what do ya think? The out-pour of feedback, and the downloads and ratings adding up everyday, I even got a guy on twitter who said I inspired him to participate in the next jam! it’s just a fantastic feeling.

Overall, I think 2017 is gonna be a great year for game development. You all ignited a fire of passion inside me, and Intend to use it. Again, thank you all so much, and I hope to see you in the next JAM!

I just want to thank everyone who played our game and left a valuable feedback. You guys are awesome!

I played a lot of interesting games during this LD. It was an epic journey. We got more than we expected. There is still some time left so let’s push this to the limits. You can try our game (find a link below). If you like it leave a comment so I can try your game too. Have Fun!

“One Room”. This theme was unexpected. But it turned to be a very interesting one. It wasn’t a hard one for us. The idea immediately popped up in my head. Our game designer polished it and we started our project.

Game Design

Fourcy started to make game design. First thing he made was a list of game elements. They were used as game objects. With this list I could make a set of placeholders to test mechanics, controls and other stuff. I started coding while Fourcy was working further on game design.

Next step – game mechanics. Our game has a lot of different game mechanics. Fourcy came up with around 15 of them. Not all of them made it to the end. Some were changed, rebalanced or trashed. I will not show you the full list cause this will ruin your game experience =) At this point Fourcy started to work on art.

Art

All sprites were made by Fourcy. He used Sai as graphics editor.

Level Design

Fourcy spent a lot of time polishing this “level”. It had to contain lots of “game layers”. This was the result of “brainstorming”.

There are 3 spawn points on the map. A button works as a trigger and spawns hourglasses. Active spawn changes in a clockwise direction. (This is a hint for one of the levels)

Coding

This game was made in Unity3D (C#). After recieving list of game elements I started to work. I made a list of placeholders and started to implement base logic. Here we began to move and jump. What a platformer without jumping?

Spikes added (yellow box). First real danger. By “danger” I mean DANGER. See these corpses?

Working with placeholders saved a lot of time. I’d made almost every game mechanic before we had sprites ready. But with sprites it looks better.

Music

Our game is almost ready. We need one more thing – a good soundtrack. This is where our composer starts to shine. Provided with gameplay and pictures he made an OST that changed the game. It was no longer a boring platformer but a funny game that attracts you from the start and keeps you till the end. If you like the OST and want to listen more, search for Xcentric Noizz.

Testing

We asked everyone we could to try our game. We knew it was hard so we made the game a lot easier. We can’t make it even easier because it will become boring. We did our best to balance the difficulty curve. But there’s always room to improve. And thank you for the feedback and gameplay videos. This helped us to find the problem.

This is a small (long?) post mortem for my jam entry Botanic Balcony! This was my first game jam, first time making a 3D game and my first VR game \o/

One Room

To be honest, I wasn’t intending to enter the jam because I’m busy with other things, but when I saw what the theme was Saturday afternoon I knew I had to go for it. The theme, One Room, fit well with a VR idea I had sitting around in my drafts and I figured it was a good chance to get it started.

The VR idea was simple: growing plants on your own private balcony. However, I wanted to make use of room scale VR, and have the game take up the minimum amount of space required. I wanted to make a game where everything was practically in reach and you didn’t really need to teleport around.

Thus, Botanic Balcony was born!

First Game Jam

I was lucky enough to have already drafted out ideas for this type of game months ago, so it was rather easy for me to strip everything down to the bare minimum: growing and watering plants. In that way, even though this was my first game jam, and I was working alone, and I had less than 72 hours, I didn’t really feel lost with what I needed to do. Plus, I started out with grey boxing everything 😉

The grey box ft. walls and rails.

First VR Game

I am so thankful that UE4 comes with a default VR setup. My biggest issue with getting the game running in VR was simply based around getting UE4’s default VR setup to run, which honestly came down to one thing: packing for distribution properly. Once that was out of the way, it was easy for me to run the default, throw some stuff around and get cracking.

At this point, I should mention that I was borrowing my father’s VR system for all of this. My development machine is nowhere near good enough to run VR, so the entire jam I was packing up and transferring the game between computers to test. Which lead to a lot of running back and forth. Which also led to my father not being very happy when I kept kicking him off from playing Battlefield to test. >w>;;;

In any case, getting the VR part of the game to function was easy-peasy.

The growth cycle of tomatoes.

First 3D Game

The real difficulties came in the form of this being my first 3D game. I’ve been messing with UE4 for the past few months from time to time, but mainly I was messing with shaders, learning about blueprints and so on. I’ve also never properly 3D modelled before. (I made a cup once in Bryce 4 or 5 when I was 10.)

It was… an experience…. I feel like I wasted so much time modelling things out, and I wish I could’ve included more plants. I thank youtube videos and those people who helped me out during my short twitch stream where I tried to model a pot. Otherwise I would’ve been 100% lost.

The Pot.

Because of these restrictions though, I aimed for a more low-poly type of thing, and kept most materials to be plain colors. I think it came out pretty well from a design perspective. Definitely the most complicated thing to model was the watering can.

The watering can.

Developing in VR Tips

There were a few things that came up during my development which might come in handy to keep in mind in the future if you ever try out VR development.

Make sure you’ve hit 90fps

The Vive headset is normally rather blurry for me because the distance between my eyes is less than 60cm, which is the lowest the headset supports. Because I normally feel some sort of nauseous when I play, I didn’t notice that the frame rate was running at 60fps when I first submitted the game. I had tested the game out on my brother, who happens to just not notice the frame rate drop, so I had no idea until my father tried it out. (My family is my guinea pigs.) My father noticed right away and let me know, and it took a while to figure out what was causing the cap.

In the end there were two things:

Steam will automatically cap the game at 60fps if you run it through that instead of opening it on your desktop (probably because it’s missing the VR support flag because it’s an exe and not a game on Steam)

UE4 automatically sets a cap of 62fps, and needs to be changed

It’s best to check these things first before trying out the wide variety of suggestions online. I tried changing it through command line arguments, turning off lots of settings in the post process volume and so on. In the end, it was rather simple.

Spawn a pot using a pot card!

Scale of your 3D Meshes

I’m a fairly average-sized person (5’6”), so when I was developing the game, everything felt about right for me. However my father and brother are taller (about 5’10”) so things like the fences and walls and so on originally felt rather short.

I was lucky enough that most of the models I made I guesstimated the size correctly, but for things like the door I had to look up measurements to make sure it was about right.

It was rather interesting though how you could easily go from being about average height to being a mouse, to being a giant just by changing the scale of your items.

Lots and lots of POTS

Guinea Pigs

Make sure you have some willing to suffer laggy frame rate or other such technical issues lying around. 😉

Do as much as you can without VR running

This may be specific to my setup, but the first 12 hours of the jam I was constantly testing things out and having VR running. The VR machine doesn’t really seem to be able to handle that type of workload. At one point while testing the computer started to overheat a bit and the VR headset lagged considerably. So bad that it felt like I was having the symptoms of fainting.

I ended up doing a lot of tests with dragging blocks around in UE4’s editor and flying around, using the VR machine only when absolutely necessary.

Timelapse

And that’s the gist of it! \o/

There’s tons of things I would like to add to the game, so I hope to continue it in the future. Maybe in 2017 😉